How to prepare interactive lecture notes?

This morning, during my invigilation of exam, I received an invitation from HRD to run a workshop on “Interactive Lecture Notes”. I am grateful for this invitation because I have been thinking about how to prepare an interactive lecture recently. At the end of the current semester, I gave my MRE3014 Design Aesthetic students an opportunity to criticize and improve my lecture notes. These students did not do well in their mid-term test and they requested to “make-good” of their score, hence the idea of challenging them to criticize and revise my lecture notes. Herewith the selected feedback, suggestion and revision I received from them:

• Survey the language competency and expectation of students at the beginning of semester 
• Dual-language notes 
• Colourful slides 
• Background music and appropriate sound effects 
• In-lecture reflexion plus Q&A session 
• Include physical activity as intermission, e.g. debate, discussion in small groups 
• Enrich the lecture notes with relevant or provocative graphics or images as examples 
• Include relevant animation or video 
• Insert hyperlink to every slide for self-pace learning after class 

Their suggestion and views are genuine because they went through the lesson and sufferred from the use of non-interactive lecture notes—although all of them enjoyed my lecture which filled with a lot of interesting stories. In a word, they need an interactive lecture note, at least for after class revision.

To me, Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction is still applicable, and I am going to revise all my lecture notes to make them interactive using Gagne’s approach and ADDIE instructional design model.

Before diving into revising the notes, I need to study the nature of “interactive lecture notes”. I believe that in the context of student-centred learning, lecture notes are interactive if they are embedded with educational technology or media that empowers students:

• to engage with the lecture in classroom or in e-learning environment; 
• to retain memory of events happened during lecture (interaction between lecturer and students or between lecturer and lecture note); 
• to conduct post-lesson self-pace learning or revision (remedial of learning); 
• to initiate post-lesson discovery learning (enhancement of learning); 
• to prepare for upcoming lesson. 

In other words, the interactivity of lecture notes can be grouped into three phases of a lesson, i.e. pre-lesson, during the lesson, and post-lesson. Both pre- and post-lesson are off-class or beyond class period; while during the lesson is in-class or during the conduct of lecture, which could be conducted in a physical classroom or in e-learning environment.

After clarifying my thought, now I have set the learning outcomes for the two-day workshop, that is “upon the completion of the workshop, the participants should be able to make interactive lecture notes”. And the lecture notes should enable students to:

• engage with the lecture when it is being delivered either in a classroom or through e-learning environment; 
• recall events happened during lecture that can become memory cues of learning content; 
• conduct revision of the lesson at their own pace; 
• explore materials beyond the given learning contents; and 
• prepare for upcoming lesson or lecture. 

Having thought through the intended learning outcomes of the workshop, I need to prepare the contents of the workshop. Since an interactive lecture note should achieve five learning outcomes, I decided to break the contents of the workshop into five parts.

Part 1: How to prepare an interactive lecture note that engages students in the lesson? 

To answer this question (the title), I decided to use Prezi. First of all, I registered myself for a Edu Account, and then downloaded Prezi Desktop for Windows.

The use of Prezi resolved the issues highlighted by my students as I turned one of my PowerPoint slides, titled "Effective Presentation" from a monotonous colour scheme slide into a colourful presentation with animated transitions. Herewith the Prezi:

Effective Presentation

Apart from Prezi, I also used Socrative to conduct in-class quizzes and survey. As the answers given by individual students can be recorded in Excel file, I can keep track of students' performance over time.

Part 2: How to prepare an interactive lecture note using mnemonics?

I came across the Supermemo Model developed by Dr. Piotr Wozniak, SuperMemo Research, Poland. Herewith an interesting chart called "forgetting index".



Source: http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1605/ff_wozniak_graph_f.jpg

I also tried his Supermemo 2004 software and discovered the 20 rules of formulating knowledge:

1. Do not learn if you do not understand 
2. Learn before you memorize 
3. Build upon the basics 
4. Stick to the minimum information principle: (simple is easy & repetitions of simple items are easier to schedule) 
5. Cloze deletion is simple and effective 
6. Use imagery 
7. Use mnemonic techniques 
8. Graphic deletion is as good as cloze deletion 
9. Avoid sets 
10. Avoid enumerations (列举；细目) 
11. Combat interference 
12. Optimize wording 
13. Refer to other memories 
14. Personalize and provide other examples 
15. Rely on emotional states 
16. Context cues simplify wording 
17. Redundancy does not contradict minimum information principle 
18. Provide sources 
19. Provide date stamping 
20. Prioritize 

Herewith the website if you intend to discover more about the supermemo model.

http://www.supermemo.com/


Part 3: How to prepare an interactive lecture note that facilitates self-pace revision?

Part 4: How to prepare an interactive lecture note that encourages discovery learning?

Part 5: How to prepare an interactive lecture note that motivates preparation for upcoming lesson?